If you do a significant amount of web-based research or news reading,
you may be interested in Gnosis.
Gnosis is a free Firefox add-in that takes the text of the page you are
viewing and uses sophisticated natural language processing tools to
extract the people, companies, organizations, geographies and other
items for the text. These items are then presented in a sidebar that
allows you to initiate searches from them on Google, Technorati and
Wikipedia.
Behind the scenes there’s some cool web services stuff going on – but
for the user it simply enhances the effectiveness of your research or
reading.
Gnosis is available at
http://sws.clearforest.com/Blog/?page_id=32